Rather than open that can of worms, I’ll turn the question back at you: why on earth should lack of preparation be a virtue for any art form besides improv?

I mean, look, I’m intrigued by what you’re saying. I don’t really want to argue it, I want to understand it. It’s an unusual and somewhat provocative proposal. But even if I come to see what you mean to some degree, I doubt I’ll come to believe that there’s any artform with only one single artistically defensible reason for existing.

Hasn’t that always been Jack’s problem? His inability to just let things be? He’s always got to push it and try to fix things. For most of this season, he’s been the opposite of his usual character, just chillin’, being all que sera.

So perhaps it was Jacob’s comment that lead him to a life of pushing, and never letting things alone…

Yeah, that’s pretty much the only way that flashback makes sense. When I first watched it, I thought the whole message was just “Jake has issues with his dad,” which is obviously nothing new. But if Jack’s problem is he always has to fix everything and he freaks out when there’s anything he can’t control (like a vending machine, or his ex-wife, or Kate), then the flashback kind of makes sense.

Except “giving it a little push” doesn’t quite jibe with that. Unless it’s a strained way of saying “lay off your Dad” — i.e. that Jack got stuck in the operating room, and his dad wasn’t trying to undermine his authority, but just to get him back on track. In which case Jacob gave Jack the vaguest, most obtuse advice possible, which would make me have a little bit of sympathy for Jack, which I don’t want to do.

The only reason to be doing it is so that the story can change during the telling? Huh wha? Say more now.

I don’t get the confusion; I’m saying that if it’s important that the course be charted out from the beginning to end, then that’s what movies and novels are for. If the time between installments is important, then you can do miniseries or limited series. But the appeal of long-form episodic television (or comic books, or other serials) is that the story can change while it’s in progress.

I’ve trotted out the “they’re making this up as they go along!” complaint myself, and I’m realizing now that it’s pretty silly. On “The X-Files,” they were smug about not having a “show bible,” and it ended up blowing up in their faces. But if you have a general direction in mind when you start off, then there’s no reason you should have to have every detail mapped out. Half the fun is putting all the pieces together and making something that works with and builds off of what came before.

I can imagine their plotting out the season finale of “Lost,” going through the series from the first episode and deciding what to emphasize (and what to ignore), and putting it all together to make it “mean” something they didn’t intend at the beginning. That shouldn’t be a criticism; it’s actually pretty cool.

So perhaps it was Jacob’s comment that lead him to a life of pushing, and never letting things alone…